Gridiron Girls

When the N.F.L. season began this past September, it appeared as if the sport’s cultural prominence — no other league is anywhere close to as popular or rich — might be in jeopardy. The league was plagued by scandal. The Pittsburgh Steelers, for one, were forced to play their first four games without quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who was disciplined after being accused of sexually assaulting a college student in the bathroom of a bar. The New York Jets, meanwhile, were busy hooting at the television journalist Inés Sainz on the field and in the locker room — a flap that, in hindsight, seems charming relative to the lewd text messages that onetime Jets employees received from former quarterback Brett Favre (reportedly involving a photographed penis) and the supposed foot-fetishism of the Jets’ current head coach, Rex Ryan.

This all occurred after an off-season in which the danger of the game to its players was front-page news. Of course fans had long suspected that high-speed shots to the head probably weren’t healthful — just as most people in the 1950s surmised that smoking probably wasn’t consequence-free — but the detailed reports on brain damage and the attendant Congressional hearings about football’s effect on America’s youth made suspending disbelief impossible. What’s worse, the early weeks of N.F.L. action were a sickening showcase of head-to-head collisions: concussions aplenty. Suddenly, football appeared to be more savage than ever. (Let’s not forget that this season included the celebrated return of Michael Vick, a man once involved in drowning and hanging dogs.)

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And yet, here we are. The Steelers and Jets weathered all their off-field problems to remain the last two A.F.C. teams standing. And despite its hard-line concussion stance, the league is contemplating the addition of two more grueling regular-season games to its schedule. The ratings are just too huge for the league not to consider the move, even if it causes players untold extra harm; this was the first year that each football game shown in prime time won its time slot. But here’s the truly shocking part about this N.F.L. season: Among women 18 to 49, NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” was the third-most-watched program in America, trailing only “Dancing With the Stars” and “Grey’s Anatomy” and beating shows like “Glee.” In fact, according to Nielsen, the number of women watching “Sunday Night Football ” has increased 23 percent over the last two years.

What could possibly account for this surge in popularity in what should be the league’s least-female-friendly days?

The crude archetypes of female fandom — the clueless girlfriend who asks if LeBron scored the touchdown, or the mom who waits for a pivotal moment to express her wish that they wouldn’t spit tobacco like that — manage to endure because everyone has watched a game with one of those types. But to assume that most women would take one look at the league’s violence and sexual mayhem and slowly walk away betrays a misunderstanding of football’s place in our culture, and also of women.

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Nomoco

First, the climb in women watching “Sunday Night Football” is clearly correlated to the program’s being the No. 1 television show among men. A rising tide raises all viewerships. But that can’t be all. The must-see, must-discuss quality to the N.F.L. this season seems to exist because we’re more aware of the savagery in the league, not in spite of it.

Like many other “real” fans, I got into sports in large part for the characters, stories, rivalries and heartbreak. We saw interpersonal drama where casual fans saw only supersize freaks of nature battering one another. True enjoyment was the province of the devoted. But now it’s nearly impossible for people even slightly attuned to culture not to recognize the reality-show-like intrigue of the N.F.L. News of Favre’s indiscretions larded up network newscasts; even TMZ.com has a sports page now. And of course the N.F.L. actually does have a reality show, the wonderful “Hard Knocks” on HBO. Each episode is a well-told story, with a buildup and denouement, and it’s obsessed with reality-show questions: Who’s going to get cut from the team, who’s going to move on and will these crazy people ever stop yelling at one another?

So football is now as much a part of the pop-cultural wallpaper as anything Brad does on “The Bachelor.” And the N.F.L. and NBC, savvy operators that they are, know exactly how to capitalize on this. The league recently introduced a clothing line specific to women, and it has two major social initiatives — one about breast-cancer awareness and another that encourages healthful behavior in children — that seek to make the league more palatable to women. Ads for Febreze, the official air freshener of the N.F.L., now run during games. And NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” broadcast has all the trappings of a classic Dick Ebersol production: the reliance on character-driven storytelling; the soft-focus interviews led by America’s anchor, Bob Costas; and the Faith Hill-fronted theme song (perfectly parodied by Jane Lynch on “Saturday Night Live”).

But the impact of a cute song, a few community-friendly programs and some human-interest stories is probably felt only around the margins. It’s the soap-opera aspect of the N.F.L. that makes it so broadly appealing. A friend of mine recently asked me if I wanted to watch the Jets game; like the parent of a suddenly-friendly teenager, I tried not to show my excitement. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. She has seen every season of “Real Housewives,” “Intervention” and “Jersey Shore,” after all. She has seen plenty of bad behavior. Just because a woman isn’t already a sports fan doesn’t mean she’s a delicate priss. After all, “Two and a Half Men” wasn’t that far behind “Sunday Night Football” this fall. And that show stars Charlie Sheen.

Katie Baker is a contributing writer for Deadspin.com.

A version of this article appears in print on January 30, 2011, on page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The XX Blitz. Today's Paper|Subscribe